Tuna Pasta Salad with Lemon, Green Olives, and Cucumbers

If you need a tasty idea for a summer pot-luck, this Tuna Pasta Salad with Lemon, Green Olives, and Cucumbers is always a hit and I’d love this salad for a treat with canned tuna! Use Pasta Recipes to find more like this one.

Pasta salad. When I say that do any particularly memorable pasta salads come to mind? You’re lucky if they do, because I think pasta salad is always in danger of being a bit boring if you don’t make sure to use strongly flavored and interesting ingredients.

I’m happy to report this Tuna Pasta Salad with Lemon, Green Olives, and Cucumbers experiment I came up with recently was loaded with flavor due to good quality tuna in olive oil, chopped Spanish green olives, and a generous amount of lemon juice and zest in the dressing. I also added finely chopped baby cucumbers for a little crunch, and I devoured some of this for lunch on the day I made it. If you like these ingredients, give this a try for a memorable pasta salad experience!

I’m a huge fan of this Tonno Genova Tuna Packed in Olive Oil, but lately I can’t find it at any stores by my house. I can’t go without it, so I buy it by the case from Amazon.com in the small 3 oz. cans. (Affiliate) I used 2 cans for this salad, but a 5 oz. can of tuna would also be fine. Let the tuna drain while you cook the pasta and prep other ingredients.

Slice the green olives and chop the cucumbers. If I’m making pasta or pasta salad, I’m probably using Dreamfields Low-Carb Pasta. This time I used rotini, but penne or macaroni would also work. I cooked the pasta exactly 9 minutes in salted water. Don’t overcook!

Zest most of the peel and squeeze all the juice from one large lemon. (I used about 1 T lemon zest and nearly 3 T lemon juice.) I like it lemony (!) so if you’re not such a lemon fan you might want to add part of the juice and zest and taste to see if you want more. Stir together the lemon zest, lemon juice, green olive brine, and mayo and then whisk in the olive oil to make the dressing.

Put the tuna, sliced green olives, and chopped cucumbers in a bowl and mix in about half the dressing. Then gently stir in the cooled pasta and the rest of the dressing (or enough that the salad is as moist as you’d like it. Season to taste with salt and fresh ground black pepper and serve.

The salad can be chilled or served right away, and leftovers will be good in the fridge for a day or two.

Dressing Ingredients:

3 T mayo (I used regular mayo, but you could use light mayo if you prefer)

1 T olive oil

Directions:

Bring a large pot of water to a boil, adding a couple of teaspoons of salt.

When the water boils, add the pasta, stir, and let it come back to a boil.

Lower heat a little and cook exactly 9 minutes (time it!) and then drain the pasta and let it cool. (Don’t rinse.)

While the pasta cooks, drain the tuna into a fine strainer and let the oil drain out.

Slice the olives into half-moon slices and finely chop the cucumbers. (If you don’t have small Persian cucumbers, I might scrape out the seeds from the cucumber so the salad doesn’t get watery.)

Zest and juice the lemon.

If you’re not sure how much lemon flavor you want, I would start with 2 T lemon juice and 2 tsp. lemon zest, mix in the olive brine and mayo, whisk in the olive oil, and then taste to see if you want to use the rest of the lemon juice and zest.

When the pasta has cooled, add the tuna, sliced olives, and chopped cucumbers to a bowl that’s big enough to hold all the salad and mix in about half the dressing.

Gently stir in the pasta and as much additional dressing as you need for the salad to be as wet as you’d like it. (I used all the dressing, but I like my salads on the wet side.)

Season salad to taste with salt and fresh ground black pepper and serve.

Notes:

I served some of this to my nephew Jake when it had been in the fridge overnight and we agreed it was still very good the next day. If you have leftover dressing, you might want to add a bit more to the salad after it’s been in the fridge.

Low-Carb Diet / Low-Glycemic Diet / South Beach Diet Suggestions:
Obviously pasta salad is not low in carbs, but if you make this Tuna Pasta Salad with Lemon, Green Olives, and Cucumbers with whole wheat or whole grain pasta (or Dreamfields pasta), all the low-glycemic ingredients would make this suitable for phase 2 or 3 of the South Beach Diet.

Nutritional Information?
If you want nutritional information for a recipe, I recommend entering the recipe into this nutrition analyzer, which will calculate it for you. Or if you’re a member of Yummly, you can use the Yum button on my site to save the recipe and see the nutritional information there.

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Thanks for telling me. That is a totally bizarre glitch that happened when I switched my site to WordPress; a bunch of the printer friendly links switched to link back to the same post. We are slowly updating the posts and adding a better option for displaying the recipe and printing them, but we still have a lot to do! I did fix this link so you can print it though!